community.aegirproject.org

Creating a new website using Aegir is really, really easy, and is probably one of the most exciting aspects of Aegir. The very idea of clicking a button and suddenly being able to visit a new site may even be the prospect that drove you to installing Aegir in the first place.

To create a site you must have created a Platform first, which is the codebase, typically a copy of Drupal core, on which to place your new site. Read the Platform documentation if you have not yet completed this stage.

The Site form

Much like your Platform, a site is represented as a node in the Aegir frontend. To create a new site, you must create a new Site node.

The site node is a form requiring various attributes to be filled out in order to accurately advise the Aegir system about what kind of site you wish to create. These fields commonly are:

• Domain name - the site name. This becomes the title of the node.
• Client - who is the client or owner of this site. This field really only is relevant if you have enabled the Clients feature to manage segregations of sites between clients.
• Install Profile - the install profile to use to install this site. This has a dramatic effect on the end result of your site
• Platform - the platform to install the site on. The list of available platforms is based on what profile you choose above (in other words, which platforms support that install profile. The choice of platform also implies which web server hosts that platform, so this is why 'web server' is not a selectable option in the form.
• Language - what language install the site with. This is dependent on the profile or platform chosen.
• Database server - which database server to install the database on.

Below is an example of the site form.

Installing the site

Once you have filled out the site form per your requirements, click Save to submit the form. An 'Install' task is automatically spawned and added to the task queue for the dispatcher to execute.

The backend does the hard work of essentially completing a standard Drupal installation automatically. It creates a database and database user for the site, executes the Drupal installation procedure, populates the database, and generates a web server virtualhost configuration file for the site (Apache or NginX depending on your environment). In the event that the platform is located on a remote web server, the data is synced across from the main Aegir site to the remote server.

Finally, it restarts the HTTP service to load the new site's virtualhost into the HTTP service's runtime environment.

A traditional 'welcome' e-mail containing the one-time login link is sent to the e-mail address of the 'Client' who owns this site. As well as that, the login link is generated and displayed on the new site node view (see below).

As you can see above, the successful installation of the site has provided a series of tasks available to be performed against this site. This task block is similar in appearance to the Task Queue block we previously discussed, but rather than showing a list of tasks either run, queued or processing, it instead displays the list of potential tasks that may be run for this site only.

We will discuss these tasks and more in the following sections.